I am the co-head of the LIACS Computer Systems, Imagery and Media Research cluster (30+ members), which is one of the two main research groups at the computer science department at Leiden University. In addition, as a member of the LIACS Scientific Council, I am responsible for steering the general direction of computer science research at Leiden University. My group's mission is to investigate new paradigms for the retrieval and understanding of multimedia information by developing new deep learning approaches.

My research interests focus on the frontiers of multimedia retrieval and deep learning. In many situations there is no annotation for images and video in which case the only possibility is to analyze the pictorial content. How can we develop new deep learning architectures to understand imagery based on the pictorial content? How can we endow search engines, robots and computer automobile drivers with visual intellligence? By studying the computational mixture composed of humans, artificial intelligence, network modeling, probabilistic reasoning, neuroscience, and multi-modal analysis, we may be able to provide answers to the questions in our lifetimes.